Before I start the review itself: I fucking love both the teaser and standard movie poster! Both are some of the best designed sheets in recent memory and I couldn’t even think of something fitting better than those two.

Okay, on to the movie…

Do you know the moment when you watch a movie and think “Okay, that was stupid”? Splice is a movie in which those moments occur every five or so minutes.

I.Am.Not.Kidding!

First of all there’s the experiment itself where a female scientist decides to mix human DNA with a DNA from another experiment she conducted earlier with her partner and boyfriend. To me, that was one big fat “Stupid!!!!” moment.

From there on it only got worse…

I know that the director Vincenzo Natali wanted to show us humans who cross the fine line of morality, to show us what can happen when you mix humans with animals. It’s the serious scifi route, not the action scifi route. I also know he wanted to show us people who cannot differentiate between a child and an experiment, who blur the line of protection vs. isolation/control, although both sometimes go for the control route.

But even though I somehow know the intentions it doesn’t help me at all, because…you know…

…every goddamn single character is totally and awesomly acting stupid the whole damn time!! Especially the masterminds of the experiment, Clive and Elsa, the supposed geniuses of this movie.

Clive and Elsa, the human forms of the word "stupid".

Those character are such stupid you won’t believe it. I’m sure that if they’d be in the mood, they’d burp into the face of a already massively pissed off biker. Heck they wouldn’t wait for a nanosecond, that is for sure. It’s a level of stupidity I’d only reach if I tell the world that not only Avatar was awful as shit, but Titanic, Godfather and Star Wars, too. And I am not that stupid…Not yet. Those characters on the other hand are beyond saving.

You know, conducting the experiment at all was the first major “stupid” moment as already mentioned above. Minutes later it was “let us keep it even though I got attacked by it before it even was born”. Then it was “let’s not kill it”. Then it was “let us treat it like a child and name it/her Dren (Nerd read backwards – cool idea)”. Then it was “let us hide her in a slightly unsafe location and teach her”. Then it was “lalala, let us bring her to a location in the woods that unsafe it’s not even imaginable anymore”.

This continued the whole damn time! Later on it even got more crazy and absurd. Goddammit, how can two people be so stupid? They are supposed to be geniuses, for crying out loud! Almost the whole time I was scratching my head, asking myself when the heck those two might have lost their brains. Sniffled too much DNA in the cafeteria?

If you want to watch about human stupidity – don’t look further. This is the ultimate movie regarding this theme. You cannot go further than this. But be warned: if you’Re like me who truly fucking hates movie characters acting stupid all the time, you have a problem.

You know, it's not that hard to imagine this thing being a funnily shaped human...I guess

We're getting closer...

Now we're talking, baby! (And by oh the way: why does a creature without a single strand of hair have eyebrows and eyelashes of all things?)

So what led the characters went down this whole let us act stupid stuff? One reason is that Elsa seemingly had a traumatic childhood in which she seemingly got treated badly by her mother. I guess this should establish her reason for starting this experiment at all, as we also learn at one time she never wanted a normal child. Why? It’s better to have an experiment than a baby since you better can control the first one. Well, it didn’t really help me to at least begin to feel sympathetic towards her.

Moreover I began to feel some urge to erase her from the screen because of her character trait called “massive ignorance”. mix that one with “stupidity” and you have an instant winner on your hands. One of the best moments regarding this mixture was in the second half of Splice when Elsa seriously told Clive that her beloved Dren doesn’t like meat, although she earlier gorged a rabbit in the woods in a spectacular gory way. At least this led to one of the best lines of Splice when even Clive in a true “wtf?” manner asked since when rabbits account as vegetables.

Oh yeah, Clive. Her friend and scientific partner. Well, to be honest I didn’t like him either because he not only acted stupid the whole damn time (as everyone else) but he very well knew he was acting stupid – which makes him an even more of a retard than Elsa. The only excuse he had were his sexual desires as it seems. In any case he didn’t have balls whatsoever, although he used them in more than one occasion (which results in one of the single biggest “WTF??!11!!” in recent memory – in other words: when the movie even trumps itself by pulling off one act of stupidity you’ve really never seen before).

And then there’s the single biggest flaw of this movie: I never felt truly sympathetic towards Dren, the hybrid child Clive and Elsa created. Heck, the creators of Splice even tried to make Dren look cute by having her cuddle a cat, for example (Avatar, anyone? Cats normally always work). But it simply didn’t work. The only thing I constantly thought while watching the movie was about what she probably will do next to give us a hint of her true nature. The good thing was that I was constantly sitting on the edge of my seat since there was this constant pressure.

Because of stupid characters and missing sympathy I also never deeply cared about this whole parenthood stuff Natali shows us, meaning, the main plot not centering on a monster/experiment but on a child two unfit parents try to bring up. To write it in a harsh way: The only thing I constantly thought was “Call someone! Put Dren in a prison, or even better: Kill. It. Now!”. Yeah, harsh, but that’s how I felt about Dren in many moments.

Another thing I didn’t really buy was the external pressure the plot tries to create. Before creating Dren both scientists puzzled together two blob looking creatures from which they extract some important proteins to cure humans. Something like that. Of course this takes time and the company pressures them to work on it before the next stockholders’ meeting. Having no results to market and make money from could lead into financial disaster.

I haz cat. I are cute!!

Later in the movie, the stockholder’s meeting takes place and they proudly present their results – the two creatures. But, of course, something goes horribly wrong, as the creatures start to slash each other in a truly gruesome way. Blood is everywhere and finally we see the remains splattered all over the place. And this is the exact moment when Splice almost jumped the shark to me (yeah, I endured the stupidity) because…nothing happens. At all. Nada.

You know, there are two artificial creatures created by a company. Both creatures act as gruesome as it can get. And there is no single trace of a religious leader or politician who puts a break on this whole operation. And there even doesn’t seem to be a backslash on the market. You know, I’d immediately sell my stocks after watching a failure as big as this. But that never seemed to happen; the company went on without any major hiccups. Moreover there were no signs of a journalistic wave crushing over them as it normally would happen. Nothing. Zippo. Nada.

In times in which even a sneeze from the holy Steve jobs himself can create a major disturbance in the (stock) force this simply feels ridiculous. Here the scriptwriters really messed up. I can understand their wish to keep everything as tiny as possible, but then they shouldn’t have gone the stockholder way. There could have been different ways to increase the pressure on Clive and Elsa.

Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t hate Splice – not really. It’s just that I am not that massively overwhelmed by it as many other people/reviewers/movie goers. The movie is good if you can overlook stupidity, it’s intriguing in its premise, but not fantastically great. The movie asks the right questions. It’s an intelligent scifi movie without your usual action stuff that gets boring so quickly, but accompanied by fantastic special effects.

But, oh well, on the other hand Splice offers us acts of pure stupidity on epic levels every goddamn five minutes. I.Am.Not.Kidding! If the director would’ve toned that one down just a little massive bit, the movie could have become an instant classic. Perhaps he could do something on the editing of the director’s cut.

Oh yeah man. I watched the movie weeks ago and I still can’t comprehend their level of stupidity. I swear it and I’m sure of it…in 30 years…when a scientist ruins an experiment because of some acts of stupidity, the colleagues will only say “Oh damn, this idiot pulled a Splice again…”

What a waste of Time I swear the acting and imagination of today Sci Fi flicks is awful. Why would someone produce this movie. If I was an actor on the set I be thinking what kind of crap movie is this. Oh yeah like this dude goes of and does the mating thing with the creature. I miss Sci Fi like the Alien and Predator movies. The first one’s.

The actors, movies and production crews portrayed in this motion picture blog are fictitious. Any similarity to actors or persons or movies or production crews, fictitious or real, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.